In this guide, I will walk you through some basic WordPress Troubleshooting steps to follow before submitting a support ticket. This will save everyone time when you’ve submitted your support ticket.
I’ve discussed support versus customization on the blog before, but I think it’s worth talking about basic troubleshooting again. I recommend that you perform the basic troubleshooting tips if you have an issue with your site. You should do this *before* submitting a support ticket, because anyone who is performing support is going to ask you these questions before they can attempt to troubleshoot your site:
WordPress Troubleshooting 101:
Deactivate all plugins
You will need to deactivate ALL your plugins; this will determine if it is a plugin conflict. Once all your plugins are deactivated, check to see if you issue is resolved. If it is, you have a plugin conflict. To determine which plugin is conflicting, re-activate plugins one by one while testing to see if the issue returns after activating each plugin.
Switch to a default theme
If you have ruled out a plugin conflict, then you will need to activate one of the default WordPress themes (such as Twenty Sixteen, or Twenty Fifteen). This will rule out a conflict with your theme. If switching to a default theme does not rule out your issue, we have confirmed at this point that it’s not a theme conflict. If switching to a default theme resolves your issue, we need to do further troubleshooting to determine if it’s another issue, or a theme/Genesis Framework issue.
Although this troubleshooting guide is for anyone using WordPress, since I work exclusively with the Genesis Framework, we will want to test at this point if the issue is theme related or framework related, so repeat the step above, and activate the Genesis Framework. Make sure that you are running the latest version of the Genesis Framework.
Test for widget issues/conflict
If you have recently updated a widget, this may cause conflicts with some of your site functionality, Usually, it’s a caused by invalid HTML or short-codes entered directly into a text or other widget.
To “deactivate” a widget, you can temporarily move widgets to the “Inactive Widgets” section in the dashboard to see if that resolves the issue.
Caching Plugins
If you have a caching plugin on your site, or even at your hosting site, you will want to clear any caching on your site (I recommend completely deleting the caching plugin while troubleshooting), and also clear your browser’s history, cookies and cache. Switch to another browser to test if it’s just browser specific.
If you have performed all of the steps above, and your issue is not resolved, go ahead and submit a support ticket. If you are running a Pretty Darn Cute Design theme, click this link to visit our support forum.
When you submit the support ticket, you should include a link to your site, but don’t include any personal information (such as your site’s user name or password). Anyone providing support is going to need to be able to view your site; this means that your site cannot be in maintenance mode.
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